Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Seems like Yahoo’s trying their hands at rearranging the search display. We are so used to using google and i think can hardly imagine search results in a different layout

However, I remember being asked by someone(actually in an interview) what would you change in google search and first thing that came to my mind was- “Change the Display”

Anyways back to Glue, yahoo’s new search display project.

First look and you say what the ***** …… Search for something and you get what looks like a Websites Home page itself…..Disastrous….

I think the whole notion of giving images,video and other media formats relevant to what you search is a bit funny…… HOwever I understand for relatively simple web users this might be helpful…But puttin all the format results in one page ..is it really the best UI idea that Yahoo comes up with?????

U’d rather display normal search results with tabs to access video n pics ….which thus keep populating at the back while u browse thru sites ….. Have a look at the Pic and decide for yourself…..dont forget to comment…..

One change i’d love to see in search results display would be to display web pages as(hidden text) very low res pics decently sized ….This because u most of the times know by just having a first look at the page whether its what you searched for…..Well snapping billions of homepages not a herculean task for Google or yahoo …..anyways ive given up one of my best startup ideas…..Any body to invest in me????

O! I’d love to be in the Product Team of Glue, boy do i have some ideas 🙂 kiddin ….

Who would’ve imagined that a pakistani move to ban you tube would be replicated globally amongst ISPs, leading YouTube being blocked for more than a couple of hours on Sunday. So, if you would’ve tried to access YouTube during those times, all you would’ve got was a 404 page not found.

Probably Pakistani ISPs tried to change their DNS to put YouTube to a non existent entry. That would all have been fine if it was not replicated by the DNS servers worldwide. The guys at Open DNS have though referred this as IP hijacking. Whatever might be the case, this should spark serious discussions on our mechanisms to propagate DNS changes and how to insulate different ISPs from malicious ISP’s or even the hijacking of a DNS.

Youtube is back up now and hope this becomes food for thought for all concerned.

Here’s a niche but a brilliant idea that in my view will create a whole new layer in the existing Online Jobsearch value chain

Founded by two guys, Notchup is trying to expand the target audience for the Jobsearch market. At present, you only enter the world of jobsearch if your looking to move…. but what about the rest of the professionals

Notchup thus is trying to give a reason for all those professionals who are happy in their roles and may be doing well , to come online and to not only make money by charging for being interviewed but also open themselves to some real good opportunities and serious employers

The problem with most job sites is that the people companies really want to hire don’t put their resumes on them because they are happy in their current positions. If you are a star manager, chances are your employer knows it and is treating you well so that you don’t even think about leaving. Who wants to bother looking for a job anyway if you don’t have to? That’s right up there with looking for a new house in terms of time-sinks to avoid.

The folks at NotchUp, a stealth startup based in Los Altos, California launching later this month, have a better idea. Founded by two Peerflix refugees, Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis, NotchUp tries to lure talented-but-complacent workers and managers into its recruitment pool by turning the job search on its head. Instead of desperate out-of-work employees going hat-in-hand to companies begging for a job interview, on NotchUp, the companies have to pay to interview you. This is supposed to bring out those passive job seekers every company really wants to find.

The site lets you set whatever price you like per interview, but also provides a calculator that takes into account your current position, experience, education, and salary to come up with a number. What I like about this approach is that it uses economic incentives to try to bring a better inventory of talent onto the market, just like Zillow does with its “Make Me Move” feature that lets people make unsolicited offers on houses that are not officially on the market. If a company is willing to pay you a few hundred or even a thousand bucks just to interview you, chances are they are pretty serious and it is not going to be a waste of time. It acts as a filter for both the employer and the prospective employee.

According to the site, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Powerset are all corporate beta testers using NotchUp for recruitment (well, maybe not Yahoo). NotchUp is still in stealth. The only way to get into the site right now is to be invited by a current user, which is how I learned about it.

Setting up a profile is easy, especially if you already use LinkedIn. NotchUp just imports your LinkedIn profile, you set your price, and you are ready to go. Any friend you refer to the site who gets an interview earns you a 10 percent referral fee. As employers search the site, they can make offers to interview you, which you see in your inbox. You can choose to only get offers from corporations, or from headhunters as well. And you can block recruiters from any particular company (like the one you currently work for) from seeing your profile. The service is free for job seekers, and companies pay NotchUp a fee for each resulting interview.

NotchUp is a really good idea. It turns job hunting into something more people will want to do in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. Even if you don’t get the job, you get paid for your time.

If you sell anything online, whether physical goods or services, you’re probably keenly aware of the 2-3% (plus $0.30) lost through transactional fees every time someone makes a purchase with their credit card. This fee rears its ugly head whether you use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Flexible Payment Service since those companies are largely just passing on the fees imposed on them by credit card companies.

Noca, a startup founded by ex-Visa employees, is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction feeds by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service. Since $5 billion goes towards online transaction fees every year in the United States alone, and since online vendors have particularly slim profit margins, the company thinks that the near elimination of transaction feeds would be a huge boon for online vendors. Concurrently, Noca seeks to provide consumers with a more rewarding and more secure purchasing experience, thereby making its service appealing to both actors involved in a transaction.

While Noca aims to eventually facilitate online payments for purchases of all sizes, it begins with a focus on micro-payments, and on micro-payments made through Facebook in particular. It has launched two Facebook applications to test its payments system out: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld.

The former provides a simple way to send money to friends. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the idea is to send someone a digital check; you actually enter your routing and account numbers into the application instead of using a credit card. This poses a significant obstacle to adoption (who remembers these numbers or carries around a check in their pocket?). But the company insists that using checking information rather than credit card information increases security and reduces the chances of identity theft. Plus, Noca is working to provide functionality that would allow you to enter your online banking credentials in lieu of your checking information.

The latter Facebook application, HelpYourWorld, provides a good use case for Noca’s micro-payment system. Since the application solicits $1-at-a-time donations for a series of causes, it benefits greatly from Noca’s lack of transaction fees (especially the standard fixed one of $0.30). Noca hopes that many other Facebook applications with similar micro-payment needs will use its APIs to implement its payment service.

As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier miles, and the ability to designate a part of your payment to a charity of choice. The company also insists that its service will be substantially easier to use than others like PayPal, and that consumers will gain access to a much more comprehensive transaction history than they would get elsewhere.

In the longer term, Noca will become much more like a credit card company itself, providing credit to users through direct partnerships with banks. In doing so, it will be able to provide users with the same benefits of buying things on credit without charging vendors standard transaction fees, which it considers mostly oligopolistic fat. To make money, Noca will also attempt to leverage its user data to target them with tailored advertising and product deals.

Wikia Search: Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

This is what Nikolaj has to say on O’Reilly radar

This morning Jimbo Wales’ Wikia launched their search effort, Wikia Search. Wales & co. have been getting a lot of heat for this launch, most notably from Mike Arrington at Techcrunch who calls Wikia Search “an inexcusable waste of time” and “a complete letdown”.

I have to be honest that my first reaction to Wikia Search was lukewarm, and I fully support Arrington in his assessment that Wikia Search is no viable replacement for Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, or any of the other established search players. But Wales takes out the air of Arrington’s choler by commenting that “it’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine”, recalling that

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

Were Wales goes wrong is that Wikia has released a search engine on a limited index with no opportunity for users to contribute. In terms of Wikipedia, it would be the equivalent of launching an out-of-copyright dictionary but giving users no ability to edit the erroneous articles or adding new. Wikia should not have launched without, and that is a mistake.

Yet Wikia will change search. They may very well be run overend by Google, Yahoo!, or Facebook (who eventually will turn towards search like their fraternal predecessor AOL) in the process of doing so, but they’ll change a few rules of the game.

First, valuesAOL’s search log blunder was notorious, and generally people are slowly starting to question the potential privacy invasion from our online data trails.
A Wikia employee told me today that people were already asking what the most popular search terms were. He said there was no way of finding out as no logs are kept.

Second, they’ll open search. Really.
Wikia claims that they’ll make their index freely available. If they haven’t already, we’ll almost certainly see Wikia’s index in Amazon’s S3 (Amazon is a major investor), making it effortless to create custom search engines using a couple EC2 instances. Think vertical search engines with custom algorithms for anything from gaming to Japanese manga cartoons. Talk about giving Google’s 16K employee brute-force machine competition.

Go play with Wikia Search. Then come back here and read the above again. Tell me what you see: a bluff or a ripple of change?

Disclosure: Fellow Radar blogger Artur Bergman is Director of Engineering at Wikia, and I’m posting this just a few hundred meters down the road from their Poznan (Poland) office.